Job Opportunities/ Career Prospects:
India has a huge domestic market and its rapidly growing middle class population ensures that the domestic consumption will grow by heaps and bounds in the next decade. Various positives initiatives by the Indian Governments over the past couple of decades like increasing the FDI limits, Promotion of Special Economic Zones, Implementation of GST, Make in India initiatives and etc., has ensured that India emerge as one of the Leading Manufacturing Destinations for both Domestic and Foreign Companies
As far as the Logistics Industry is concerned, India has been quickly moving from being “a highly fragmented and unorganized sector” to a formal & organized sector with several large players entering the Industry. Historically, the growth rate of the Logistics Industry has been higher than India’s GDP growth rate and this gap is set to increase even further
Most importantly, E-Commerce is a sector that is seeing an exponential growth in the recent past and this is expected to continue in the foreseeable future as well. The cash rich global e-commerce platform operators like Amazon, Walmart (Flipkart), BigBasket and etc., have majorly increased the Customer Expectations of E-Commerce Operations (Free Return Shipping, Ship to Store, 1 & 2 Day Delivery of most merchandise, 60 mins delivery of Grocery and etc.,) and this in turn is resulting in huge investment by these companies to meet the Customer Expectations. Overall, the future looks very positive for Manufacturing and Logistics sectors, which means that more job and opportunities will be created for Logistics & Supply Chain Management Professionals in the next decade
In a recent survey of Young Professionals by the “Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals”, more than 81% of the respondents said they made the right career choice be selecting Logistics & Supply Chain Management specialization.
Students who choose this specialization have several career choices and some of the areas that are seeing a huge demand currently is detailed below:
1. Supply Chain Planning in Manufacturing & Services Industries, that includes one or more of the following: Overall Supply Chain Planning, Demand Planning, Capacity Planning, Production Planning, Logistics Resource Planning and etc.,
2. International Business that includes Freight Forwarding, Shipping, Shared Service Centres/ Outsourced Back Office Operations and etc.,
3. Logistics and Transportation Functions that includes Warehouse Operations, Inventory Planning and Controlling, Fleet and Transport Management
4. E-Commerce Operations that includes Management of Warehouses/ Fulfilment Centres and Management of Logistics Operations like Transportation and Distribution
5. Information Technology Sector – The explosive growth of Cloud Services (SaaS) and the ever expanded functions of ERP software (both in breadth and depth) has resulted in a huge demand of Functional Consultants in IT Companies. The increase in penetration of ERP Solutions and Niche Supply Chain Management, Transportation Management and Warehouse Management IT Software within all Sizes of Indian Companies (Small, Medium and Large) has presented a huge opportunity for Young Logistics and Supply Chain Management Professionals